Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  Filming the lyric play had been a pleasure for Burton, who took great delight in instructing Peter O’Toole exactly how to say the lines, and marveling at how true was Elizabeth’s Welsh accent. Her rendering of Dylan Thomas’s verse is immensely appealing, and it must have delighted Richard to see Elizabeth transformed into a “Welsh tart,” the subject of his erotic dreams since youth. But when the film was released later that year, few people went to see it. Critics veered from describing it as lugubrious and longwinded, ill-suited to film, to praising Burton’s fine and loving rendering of Dylan Thomas’s verse. One of the reviewers who praised it was Judith Crist, who had not been generous toward the Burtons in the past. She wrote, “[T]he winning film of the moment is Under Milk Wood…[Burton’s] voice washes over the screen.” Even Pauline Kael—also not a fan—described in the New Yorker her enjoyment of “just sitting back and listening…you feel the affection of the cast and you share in it.” Though the movie, not surprisingly, made little money, Burton was glad he had undertaken it, paying his debt, as it were, to Dylan Thomas, to the poetry, and to the country that had made him who he was. And, perhaps, to his father.

  If Under Milk Wood was a labor of love, the black comedy Hammersmith Is Out was another miscalculation that had seemed like a good idea. After all, it was a comedic variation of the Faust legend; it was directed by that most literate and amusing of men, Peter Ustinov; and they were able to film it in Mexico, in Cuernavaca, not far from Puerto Vallarta. Once again, it was strictly a small-budget movie, financed by a manufacturer of mobile homes. A young Beau Bridges played Billy Breedlove, a male nurse in a mental hospital, tempted by Hammersmith, a criminally insane patient who transforms Breedlove into a rich, powerful man. Elizabeth Taylor plays a blond waitress, Jimmie Jean Jackson, a parody of her Helen of Troy role in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Peter Ustinov plays the institution’s head doctor.

  Before signing Bridges, the producer had considered Robert Redford, but after watching him in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Burton was unimpressed. “The man Redford that I’d heard so much about is disappointingly ordinary,” he wrote in his diary. “It is just as well that he turned down Hammersmith, as he has a quality of dullness. And I can see quite easily why he has taken so long to become a star.”

  Redford, who didn’t turn out so badly, was wise to have refused the role: the film was a disaster. The reviews noted Burton’s unblinking stare and unhealthy appearance. One associate of Richard’s thought that he was not only drinking heavily, but was also snorting cocaine, which he’d been introduced to while filming Villain. That seems unlikely, however, given Burton’s fear of taking drugs, as he admitted to Bernard Weintraub. He hadn’t particularly liked the Valium and occasional Seconals he took to try to stay sober, and he would always prefer alcohol to prescription—or nonprescription—drugs.

  Elizabeth, approaching her fortieth birthday, often appeared bored and put out with Richard. She didn’t show up to watch his scenes, though he always made a point of watching hers. They seemed to be saving their compliments to each other for the press. Melvyn Bragg described them as looking like “two heavyweight champions who had fought each other to exhaustion but cannot quit.” This would be their tenth film together and their fifth flop in a row, and—given the nervous state of the movie business—it was questionable that any Hollywood producer would take another chance on the Burtons.

  In truth, the Burtons were running an endless marathon. Richard’s twenty-one days in the desert without alcohol, during the shoot of Raid on Rommel, was followed by drinking with such a vengeance it was taking its toll on everyone around him. But the Burtons were still praising each other, and their marriage, to the press (“The quivering awareness of everyday in my relationship with Richard makes it seem that we’re not even married yet,” Elizabeth told the Ladies’ Home Journal), but they weren’t speaking those words of love to each other. If anything, Richard was beginning to fear that Elizabeth might leave him.

  In May, Villain was released, to mostly poor reviews. Vincent Canby in the New York Times inquired, “Whatever Became of Richard Burton?”

  Calling the film “his latest and least interesting bad movie,” Canby dismisses Burton’s performance as “drab,” then goes on to give a postmortem of Burton’s twenty-year career, beginning with the old notion that he had peaked as a Shakespearean actor on the London stage even before coming to America to make movies. It was the tired complaint, to which he added a new charge: that Burton was nothing but an old-fashioned movie star, belonging, with Elizabeth, “more to Walter Winchell’s day than to ours.” He goes on to dismiss the idea that Burton is a great talent corrupted by wealth and fame, and that a film like Villain “is all that Burton ever could have been, that no one has been corrupted, only remarkably lucky, and remarkably lucky for a lot longer than anyone in his right mind could reasonably hope for.”

  It was a harsh assessment, but, ironically, one with which Burton, on a dark day, would have agreed. One day, after having walked in on Elizabeth and their children all gathered together on the Kalizma to watch a print of Cleopatra, Richard quickly exited. He still could not stand to watch himself onscreen. “My lack of interest in my own career, past, present, or future, is almost total,” he then confided in his diary.

  All my life, I think I have been secretly ashamed of being an actor, and the older I get the more ashamed I get…. the press have been sounding the same note for years—ever since I went to Hollywood in the early 1950s…that I am or was potentially the greatest actor in the world and the successor to Gielgud, Olivier, etc., but that I had dissipated my genius, etc. and “sold out” to films and booze and women. An interesting reputation to have and by no means dull, but by all means untrue.

  Perhaps that’s why, when Burton received a letter from Sir Laurence Olivier offering him the chance to take over the running of England’s National Theater, he wrote a long letter turning down the offer. “The old Etonians would drive me mad in five months” was his excuse.

  Elizabeth had always been more resilient and more realistic about her films and her career. At breakfast the next morning, she said to Richard about having watched Cleopatra for the first time since its premiere in 1963, “You know, it’s really not so bad after all.”

  If drinking, bickering, and making lackluster movies had taken over the Burtons’ lives, the only thing that seemed to bring them pleasure was their family. So when Michael and Beth Clutter Wilding brought their first child, Layla, into the world on August 26, 1971, making Elizabeth “the world’s most glamorous grandmother,” things were—at least temporarily—set right.

  The Burtons had escaped the disappointing reception of Under Milk Wood and Villain by cruising the Mediterranean on the Kalizma. When news of the birth reached them in Monte Carlo, they rushed back to London. Elizabeth showed up at Heathrow in an ungrandmotherly outfit of white-lace hot pants and white knee-high boots. She told the handful of reporters how happy she was. “This is the baby Richard and I could never have,” she beamed. They took possession of Richard’s house in Hampstead next door to the home they’d bought for Michael and Beth, so Elizabeth could lavish gifts and attention on the newborn. She adored Layla and bought the infant Dior baby clothes. She had always been generous and welcoming to Beth as well, but all too soon, there was trouble in paradise.

  Not surprisingly, her teenage son was not happy living on his mother’s and stepfather’s largesse. Elizabeth had already gotten Michael a job as Bozzacchi’s assistant on the set of Zee and Co., and she and Richard helped support the young family, but the Burtons—like any set of parents in the early 1970s—were not pleased when Michael turned his London house into something of a crash pad for visiting hippies. The Burtons were spending a fortune on security for their home, but right next door, all kinds of street people were wandering in and out. Soon, Michael ducked out of his life of privilege and headed for the hills, taking Beth and Layla with him. They left London to join a commune in, of all places, Ponterwy
d, a small mountain town in Wales not far from Pontrhydyfen. If Richard was touched by his stepson’s odd tribute of following in his footsteps—in reverse!—he didn’t show it. Instead, it angered him. “I made it up and the boy’s trying to make it down,” he said, utterly bewildered. “I try not to interfere, but I still get goddamned mad. When I think what it took to climb out!”

  Burton was hard on Michael, feeling that he didn’t quite realize what a gifted actress his mother was, that her success was based only on her beauty. To add to his crankiness, Burton, at forty-five, was beginning to have more health problems—painful recurrences of gout, a tremor, and his old shoulder and neck injuries were starting to affect the use of his arms. In July 1971, he had written: “My left hand and wrist are now completely useless…I was so uncomfortable last night that in bed the slightest movement made me groan as if demented.” Soon after, a doctor came to attend Elizabeth, and Richard waylaid him to examine his arm. The doctor overcame Burton’s fear of taking drugs and prescribed Endocin, a painkiller, which helped for a while, but Burton soon found there were few things he could grasp and pick up with his left hand.

  In September, the Burtons traveled to Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, where Burton would play Marshal Tito in The Battle of Sutjeska, a state-sponsored film paid for by the Yugoslav government. One of many fans of Richard’s World War II action film Where Eagles Dare was the war hero Tito himself, who flattered himself that Richard resembled him when he was a young man fighting the Fascists in World War II.

  Again, Richard was warned not to do it. The script was 250 pages long, written entirely in Serbo-Croatian, but Burton was an admirer of the real-life war hero and he wanted to take on the role. He may also have sensed that he would only continue to have a great career—any career—if he played great men of history. But Hollywood was no longer paying.

  The producer, Nikola Popovic, wanted to find a cameo role for Elizabeth, but this time she declined. They stopped in Dubrovnik to shop for books for the yacht, and, as usual, Elizabeth’s appearance on the streets of the city attracted crowds. They had cruised in on the Kalizma, mooring in Cavtat, a harbor town south of Dubrovnik, and each day Burton would be flown by military helicopter to the movie’s location in the mountains of Yugoslavia, at the site of the original World War II battle in which Tito and twenty thousand partisans had broken through the German siege.

  Marshal Tito invited the Burtons to spend weekends in his palatial home, driving them around his estate in his Lincoln Continental (presented to him by the city of Zagreb). Though Burton admired Tito, he quickly became bored both with the whole production and with Tito’s company, and not only because everything had to be filtered through interpreters. They had to listen to Tito’s and his wife’s long stories before the interpreters could even begin. Perhaps being with a great man was less interesting than playing one. “Were it not, actually, for E.’s delight in the power and the glory of it all, I would do my best to cut and run—so great is the strain of boredom,” he wrote in his diary. The production itself was plagued by endless delays, money shortages, and the constant hiring and firing of screenwriters and directors. He spent most of his time sitting around in Tito’s hut, drinking Nescafé and trying to get through a Neil Simon script, The Gingerbread Lady, which Elizabeth was considering. He wanted out, but it was impossible. To make matters worse, the daily helicopter rides were sometimes harrowing, and at one point he feared he would be killed on his way back to the Kalizma. He flashed on an image of Elizabeth lying in her bed on the yacht, reading a book, and he suddenly remembered the words from a poem by the Welsh poet Alun Lewis: “If I should go away,/beloved/do not say,/he has forgotten me./Forever you abide./A singing rib within my dreaming side.”

  Oddly enough, Elizabeth had her own premonition about Richard. One day she accompanied him to the helicopter pad and watched her husband, his makeup man Ron Berkeley, and another assistant climb on board. “Suddenly, something came over me,” she later wrote about the incident.

  “Guys, get out of there,” she called out.

  They looked at her quizzically.

  “Richard, get out of there, just get out!”

  He didn’t argue with her. They climbed into another helicopter. Later, Burton and his makeup man returned, “visibly shaken,” Elizabeth recalled. The helicopter they were supposed to have taken had crashed in the mountains, killing everyone onboard.

  It wasn’t the first time Elizabeth had had premonitions. She knew, even before Dick Hanley and Dr. Kemener had walked into her bedroom many years ago with the grim news, that Mike Todd had been killed when the Liz crashed into the Zuni Mountains of New Mexico. And the night before the death of her good friend, the actor Gary Cooper, she’d dreamed of his death from cancer, waking up to write down the time on a Kleenex box beside her bed: 12:25 a.m., which was indeed the exact time of his death the following night.

  Throughout the shoot, the Burtons, Bozzacchi and his wife, Claudye, and Elizabeth’s secretary, Raymond Vignale, stayed at Marshal Tito’s house, though Burton usually preferred to hole up on the Kalizma, with Maria and Liza. Among the five adults, Richard noted, only Elizabeth was drinking. He had once again attempted to go on the wagon, drinking Nescafé and tea by the gallon. But ever the frugal Welshman, Richard noticed how huge their liquor bills were, amazed that it was even possible when they brought most of their alcohol from the yacht—Smirnoff and Jack Daniel’s, which weren’t even available in Yugoslavia. Of the five of them, “only Elizabeth drinks, but she drinks only booze brought from the boat,” he recorded. “I have in my time and at my best put away I’m sure the occasional three bottles of vodka a day…but not for two or three days in a row. And not for a week or a fortnight. Otherwise, it would be Dead Dad.”

  Trying to stay away from drinking was difficult around Elizabeth. He was feeling the strain of sobriety, the boredom of the shoot, and noticing with concern how Elizabeth seemed to give in to a deep lassitude now that she wasn’t working. One day, he just snapped when fourteen-year-old Liza asked him if they could keep the dog they were using in the film. Burton said no, because it would whine for its owner all through the night.

  Liza persisted, saying, “But he’s your dog.”

  “Don’t be bloody stupid,” he shot back. “He’s no more my dog than you are my daughter.”

  Liza was stunned, but bravely answered, “That was very nice.” Elizabeth, overhearing, was horrified. Richard reproached himself endlessly, afterward. “I wanted to cry or slit my jugular,” he later wrote, because he really did love his and Elizabeth’s children, taking great delight in what a canny little charmer Liza could be. But the damage had been done, and he realized it.

  The most frightening part of it, for Richard, was that those cruel, unthinking words had been uttered when he was sober. Adding a new terror to his struggle with alcohol was the fear that drink had already distorted his personality.

  For a man who so often expressed contempt for his profession, Burton never stopped working. Elizabeth continued to glide through 1971, making two films (a small role in Under Milk Wood and her costarring role in Hammersmith Is Out) to Richard’s three (Milk Wood, Hammersmith, and The Battle of Sutjeska). In October, he would appear in a fourth film, playing Leon Trotsky in The Assassination of Trotsky, another Joseph Losey–directed film, and another box office disappointment. In fact, the movie’s reception was so bad (it was actually booed at the New York Film Festival in Alice Tully Hall when it was shown the following year) that it left sixty-three-year-old Losey a nervous wreck, pacing his suite at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, asthmatically puffing on his inhaler and longing for a drink. Burton had actually been Losey’s third choice, after Dirk Bogarde and Marlon Brando had both turned him down. Losey’s blend of Harold Pinteresque silences and stylized, arty set pieces sometimes tipped his films into unintentional parody, and the critics had a field day (Monthly Film Bulletin compared it to Boom!). Despite the bad reception of the Losey-Burton collaborations, the three remained
good friends, and Richard always defended what he considered Losey’s genius as a director.

  A few scenes were shot on location in Mexico, but most were filmed in a replica of Trotsky’s villa on a soundstage in Rome. After a difficult shoot, Burton would return to the Kalizma, where Michael, Beth, and Layla Wilding had joined Richard and Elizabeth for a visit. Both Burtons had stopped drinking for a brief time, and Richard remarked in his diary how beautiful Elizabeth looked—newly slim and healthy—and what a pleasure it was to have Michael and his family with them. “The virtual cessation of drink has made a terrific difference to E.,” he wrote. “She is more active, more spirited, and at the same time more relaxed. And she looks even more beautiful than before.” He and Elizabeth took great delight in Layla, a sweet and happy infant whom Elizabeth absolutely doted upon.

  But by November 10, their sober idyll was over. To celebrate his forty-sixth birthday, Burton fixed himself and Elizabeth a couple of large martinis in the early afternoon. And a few days later, Richard wrote, “E. is trying to press me to having a martini before lunch because she wants one and doesn’t like drinking alone…as I’ve explained to E. ad nauseam, I find one drink simply not enough. I guess two or three stiff ones are what I find satisfactory, but that means slowly reverting to being a drunkard again, and I simply will not tolerate returning to that….” As for Elizabeth, she didn’t seem to show the ill effects of alcohol as much as Richard. She could brawl with Richard and shout obscenities, but she never turned cruel.